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Author Topic: antiambush early warning system  (Read 3565 times)

Loud Whispers

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  • They said we have to aim higher, so we dug deeper.
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Re: antiambush early warning system
« Reply #15 on: June 15, 2012, 01:34:56 pm »

candy bolts were lost? damn...

orbcontrolled

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Re: antiambush early warning system
« Reply #16 on: June 15, 2012, 03:23:07 pm »

That sounds like a neat idea. Until the cart crashes into a hunting party, or some elves. Actually it's still a neat idea :P

In fact, who needs pets at all? Build a track all the way around the edge of your embark and put a couple hundred mine carts full of sharp things on it on a continuous loop. The carts will quickly crash into anything entering the map, either killing it or making enough commotion to alert someone.

Some quick calculation tells me that you will need about 196 carts all running adjacent to each other in order to form an unbroken ring around a standard 4x4 embark. Of course such a superdefence would require either incredible timing, or a mind-bogglingly complex dwarf-puter to make sure that all the carts are evenly spaced.

(Bonus points if your dwarfputer automatically replaces derailed carts from a queue of prepared extras.)

(Bonus Bonus points if you can solve the friendly-fire problem.)
« Last Edit: June 15, 2012, 03:24:54 pm by orbcontrolled »
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Rakushun

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Re: antiambush early warning system
« Reply #17 on: June 15, 2012, 04:41:57 pm »

(Bonus Bonus points if you can solve the friendly-fire problem.)

(Bonus Bonus Bonus points if you can solve the friendly-fire problem... but choose not to.)
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khearn

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Re: antiambush early warning system
« Reply #18 on: June 15, 2012, 06:58:22 pm »

The trouble would be that once a cart hits something, it will stop on the track and the next cart will hit it, and so on and so on. It's be like, well, watching a train wreck. And then you'd have to send dwarves out to clean it all up. I suppose if you had powered rollers on every tile of track it would just start back up on its own. But that's a lot of power.

Hmmm, will rollers transmit power to adjacent rollers, like pumps will transmit power to adjacent pumps? I hope so, if not, that's also a lot of mechanisms to route the power and more power for the mechanisms).
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Have them killed. Nothing solves a problem quite as effectively as simply having it killed.

Sabreur

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Re: antiambush early warning system
« Reply #19 on: June 15, 2012, 07:18:30 pm »

MrDorf survived. MrLlama did not :(.

Llama!  Nooooooooooooooooo!
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